April showers leaving you feeling blue? Check out this week's Fanart Friday to cure those blues! (Sorry)

Fanart Friday returns, and it's blue (da be dee, da ba die), and that is the only reference to that song that I will use in this entire column. Last week, we celebrated the release of Iron Man: Rise of Technovore with a look at the enemies and allies of Tony "Iron Man" Stark, but this week we're back to our regularly-scheduled programming--our "colors" theme, and this week we're focusing on the color BLUE!

Commence uncontrollable sobbing

In our last installment for colors, we looked at red--and like red, blue is one of the primary colors in terms of "RGB" and "CMYK" color designation. Blue is a color that covers most of the Earth's surface as water, and in fiction is often a color that represents heroes and classical courage. Notice all the G.I. Joes had blue lasers, or how Jedi have blue (or green) lightsabers, while their evil counterparts had red lasers?

For every "red" character in anime, manga, games and comics, there's at least one "blue" character to balance them out--let's get started!

What better place to start than an entire tribe of people who wear blue all the time? Avatar: The Last Airbender introduced us to the Water Tribe (properly pronounced like this, gesture and all), with The Legend of Korra shedding more light on these Ainu/Inuits with American accents.

There's always a "blue" character in magical girl series, and for many, Sailor Mercury was one of the first. I could've gone with Neptune, but in the requests over the last two weeks, Mercury was the one everybody thought of first!

Every one of Street Fighter's characters is built around a simple visual template, and Chun-li's blue-and-gold dress is one of those instantly-recognizable character designs. Plenty of other fighting games have "blue" characters, but few are as timeless as the Interpol agent here.

Fine, one more mascot--this time it's the Blue Blur, Sonic the Hedgehog! Being the relic of the '90s that he is, Sonic is still into tOtAlLy eXtReMe and badical activities like snowboarding and wearing Soap Shoes. I had a pair of Soap Shoes in high school... it's a wonder I never broke my freakin' neck.

Jeez, how many people in this week's Fanart Friday are using actual names instead of screen names? That's awesome! Anyways, when people think of Dragonball, they tend to think of orange--either for the Dragon Balls themselves or main character Goku's outfit--but vicious rival Vegeta is always in blue! Whether he's in his Saiyan armor or just chillin' in a tank-top, yoga pants, and white dishwashing gloves, blue is Vegeta's regular color.

With all the heroes in Tiger & Bunny, you'd think blue would be a more prevalent color, but no--you have Origami Cyclone's dark blue and gold, and then you have Blue Rose and her hilarious crush on a much-older man. I like how they handled that at the end of the series.

DC always has a thing for color-themed superheroes--there's Green Lantern and Green Arrow, Red Robin, Red Arrow (always preferred Speedy or Arsenal for him), and one of my favorites of the bunch, the Blue Beetle! Honestly, I've always been more of a Ted Kord fan--I think they just burned me out on Jaime Reyes by prominently featuring him in both Young Justice and Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

I already talked about the color-themed Generation of Miracles from Kuroko's Basketball in Seeing Red Edition, and Aomine stands out as one of the most dangerous antagonists our heroes face. We got to see him completely school Kagami, but the anime has yet to show what this blood knight in blue is really capable of!

Out of all the Warlords of the Sea that we encounter in One Piece, Jinbe is the biggest, most certifiable grade-A badass of the whole bunch--yeah, even more than Mihawk. Mihawk is your typical anime swordsman with a massive ship-cutting blade, but Jinbe's mastery of Fishman Karate borders on the ludicrous as he punches out whole crowds of people without even touching them. GOD I LOVE ONE PIECE

Holy crap, what's got Saber so fired up? While she spends most of her time in the Fate series wearing her silver armor with a blue outfit underneath, do you ever notice how more often than not she tends to have blue casual clothes, too? Little note: she has "Excalibur" written on her bat. I pity the fool who got on her bad side.

In Devil May Cry, Dante is "red," and his brother Vergil is "blue." However, that's not all the contrasts between them! Dante uses large western-style swords and a rough, acrobatic fighting style, while Vergil sticks to an elegant daitou and a clean, efficient fighting style. I gotta say, I also really like Vergil's coat from the new DmC reboot.

Has anyone done a mashup of Magi to the soundtrack from Aladdin? 'Cause that would be awesome. This Aladdin doesn't really need to be one jump ahead of the breadline, one swing ahead of the sword, but he seems to end up in just as much trouble...

Despite having a strange, incomplete filler ending, Blue Exorcist has quickly jumped into that small group of series that I rewatch every year or so. While I love the characters (like main character Rin here) and the overall story, I think it's the music that really does it for me.

ARE YOU READY, GUYS? PUT YA GUNS ON! Sadly, Date Masamune does believe in volume control, unlike Sanada Yukimura. Sengoku BASARA has its loud-and-crazy hero with Yukimura, but Date is the cool and collected one... at least most of the time.

Beauty Cure was one of the requests for this week, and I can see why! Remember what I said at the start of the article about how every magical girl group has a "blue" member? You PreCure fans will have to fill in the blanks for me, though--I've only watched the first handful of episodes (and really enjoyed them!).

Now, a lot of people were asking for the leading man from Hayate the Combat Butler, but I had a hard time finding good art of him. Now, that's not a slight against the artists who put their time and effort into their fanart, but I kept finding pics of Hayate crossdressing and with bunny ears.

After spending a little longer than I normally do looking for a picture I liked that had Hayate in his trademark suit, I finally said "the hell with it" and just went with one of the crossdressing pics. It couldn't be that bad, right?

Here I'm kinda wishing I had more space between the conclusion of this week's Fanart Friday and Hayate's junk, but there are some things you just can't run away from, no matter how much you want to.

Which characters do you think best exemplify the color blue? As for next week, we'll be rounding out April's "color" theme with GREEN! Remember, your work is always welcome here on Fanart Friday regardless of your experience or skill level, so just PM me a link to your work and I'll make sure to include it in a future installment!

Thanks again for checking out Fanart Friday! Have a great weekend, and we hope you drop by next time!